User blog:BirdOfBlueFeathers22/Review of "The Tooth, The Whole Tooth, and Nothing But The Tooth"
Here is another repost of an episode I already reviewed (I removed it ages ago, though). Synopsis of Episode The title card begins on a light blue background. Beaver Boy is with the birds and nervously has his hands over his mouth, eventually taking them off to reveal he has a tooth missing. We open to the birds near Quack's pond. Quack has his right foot over his eyes, Peep is slowly walking near a rock, which he crouches behind (with his briefly only his right eye open), and Chirp is hopping over to a leaf, which she puts over herself. "Peep, Chirp and Quack are playing their favorite game," says Joan Cusack. "Hide and seek." Quack responds to her, saying, "Actually it's more like a game of seek. No one's good enough to hide from a duck!" His smug look is interrupted by a breeze rustling the bush behind him. He glances over in the direction of it, gets a determined look in his eyes and tiptoes offscreen. We cut to the other side of the bush, which Beaver Boy has his head in. He comes out of it, looking sad and shaking his head. "AH-HA!" says Quack, popping up from the other side. He comes around and says to the camera, "See? I found Beaver Boy, and he wasn't even playing!" Beaver Boy, meanwhile, looks miserable; we see his left tooth is chipped. "Ahoy, blue sailor," he says tiredly. "You sound funny," says Quack looking at him, concerned. Ducking (pun intended) his head right near Beaver Boy's chipped tooth, he narrows his eyes and asks if he has something in his mouth. "Oh no!" cries Peep from offscreen. "What happened, Beaver Boy?" he asks, as he and Chirp walk onscreen, looking concerned. Beaver Boy sighs. Quack moves his head to get a look at the chipped tooth, and then moves it behind Beaver Boy (both with a funny bow-drop sound effect) and then looks at him strangely. He asks Peep, "What do you mean? What's wrong with the beaver?" "Quack," Chirp says, "Can't you tell? He's missing his tooth!" "No!" Quack says, surprised, and then, "Really?" "Yes," Beaver Boy says."I lost it. See?" And he points to the gap in where his other tooth was. Quack looks at it closer, and says, "Ummm...mmmmmm. Interesting...can you still be a beaver with only one tooth?" Beaver Boy gasps at this. "Quack!" Chirp says, afront, hands on hips. "Of course you're still a beaver," she says kindly to Beaver Boy, patting him on the arm. She then explains to him that being a beaver has nothing to do with teeth and gives him a smile, and he gives her a sheepish one in return. "Not much anyway," says Quack. "You know..." Beaver Boy looks unhappy and covers his teeth at this, and Chirp glares at Quack. Peep asks Beaver Boy if he knows where he lost it, and that maybe they could find it. "I don't know," responds Beaver Boy. "I don't remember." Chirp reminds him that he was swimming with Quack a lot yesterday, so maybe...and then Quack happily jumps into the air, saying, "The fish! The fish will know where it is!" And off he goes into the right lower corner of the frame, leaving the other three looking happy. We fade to Quack underwater with the fish. "It's white and big and it's called a tooth!" he tells them. "Beaver Boy needs it to be a beaver." "White and hard," Fish Jr. muses. "Oh yeah! I found something like that yesterday." She swims off to get it. While waiting, Quack goes up for air. I still don't get how he can talk underwater if he has to do that. Anyways, he comes back down, right before Fish Jr. returns with a golf ball in her mouth, saying something around it. (So...is the park located near a golf course? Hmm.) Quack looks at it and tells her no, telling her it's flat like his foot (he gives a quack and wiggles it). Fish Jr. drops the ball and swims off again. We cut to her looking for the tooth. "White..." she says, swimming past a bicycle tire. "Hard..." she continues, swimming past a shoe (nice continuity from "The Fish Museum" there!). "Flat..." she continues, swimming near a white button, and exclaims, "Got it!" and takes it in her mouth before swimming back to Quack. We cut back to Quack as she returns. He inspects the button. Joan says that it was close, but not close enough. Quack shakes his head, leaving Fish Jr. looking sad. We cut to the surface of the pond, where Peep, Chirp and Beaver Boy are waiting. Quack resurfaces. "No tooth," he says. "Uh-uh." He swims to the shore, as Beaver Boy looks even sadder. "You know," Chirp says, "Maybe we could make you a new tooth." Peep nods and Quack blinks. "We just need to find the right stuff," she says. We fade to inside Quack's bush. "Careful," Quack says as Peep and Chirp look through it. "Don't touch that," he says to Peep as he pecks at what looks like a lid but sounds like ceramic. Chirp nudges a shard of a broken plate with her foot as Quack says, "That's mine, that's mine." Peep walks over to what looks like a keychain and Quack runs over to him, saying, "That one there's mine!" And as Chirp pecks at a dark green object I can't identify, he adds, "And that...that-that-that-that's mine." A creepy sound effect is heard and Chirp angrily flaps her wings, saying, "Why do you keep saying that? It's all yours!" "Well, I'm just, y'know, reminding you," Quack tells her coolly, and he sniffs and quacks. "Hey!" says Peep from offscreen. Quack looks at him. "Would this work?" Peep asks, staring at something at his feet. He picks it up in his beak; it appears to be a cracker. "A cracker?" Quack says in shock. He angrily walks over and tells Peep, "NO. That-that-that-that wouldn't work AT ALL!" And he takes it in his beak, staring at Peep in annoyance. "You never know, Quack," Chirp tells him. "It's worth a try." Flapping her wings, she jumps up and takes it in her own beak. Quack follows her, sadly saying, "But I was saving that!" Peep follows him. As they exit the bush, he continues, "For uh, eh---for you! Yeah! It was going to be a present for you. Can't be any more I guess." As he talks, Chirp just glares at him angrily; he pauses and Peep bumps into him. "Oh well, no present for you," he finishes. We cut to Beaver Boy trying to gnaw a tree, but all he's succeeding in doing is making toothmarks in it. Chirp comes up to him with the cracker, and he laments that his gnawing doesn't work. "Here...try this," says Chirp, giving him the cracker. She puts it in place of the tooth and Beaver Boy brightens, tapping it. He gnaws the air happily, to which Chirp gives him a strange look. A pause...and then he devours the cracker. Quack screeches in horror. Chirp looks back to him sadly as Beaver Boy finishes eating. "Sorry," he apologizes. "Okay," says Chirp to her friends. "First rule about beaver teeth: is they can't taste good. Quack quacks sadly. We fade to Beaver Boy and Chirp; the former with his mouth open and the latter pecking at his tooth with her beak. Next we fade to Peep standing on Beaver Boy (who's on his back) and inspecting his tooth. Then, we fade to Quack in front of Beaver Boy, holding his right foot up. He then tapes a sharp edge of it with said foot...and yells "Ouch!" in pain. Beaver Boy looks remorseful, but we cut to a closeup of the foot as we see it throbbing in pain. Ouch. And then, we fade to Chirp, measure Beaver Boy's tooth with her wings. As all this is going on, Joan explains that after they carefully measured Beaver Boy's tooth from every possible angle, Chirp had a clear idea of what they needed. We then fade to Chirp on a rock next to Beaver Boy, both facing Peep and Quack. "OK," she says. "The new tooth needs to be hard, and flat..." "...and sharp," Quack puts in. "And sharp," Chirp agrees. "And the same size as the old one." Here, Peep runs to the left of the screen and out of the frame. "So I can chomp through trees and be a Beaver again," says Beaver Boy. Chirp, surprised, asks him what he's talking about. "You are still a beaver," she tells him. "We think," says Quack. Beaver Boy puts his hands up to his face in horror on hearing this. And Chirp gives him an epic stare. "Would this work?" asks Peep in a muffled voice from offscreen. Chirp looks over and Peep comes onscreen, carrying a flat, roundish piece of rock in his beak. He sets it on the ground and Chirp comes off the rock she's been standing on to look at it. "Well, it's not the right shape," she says. She then pecks at it and says, "But it's hard and white....and long enough." Peep nods happily. The two then look to Beaver Boy, who picks it up (revealing it's actually a shell) and rubs his tooth along it. Pleased with the result, he sets to molding it into the shape of a tooth by scratching it on a rock. "You know where I found that?" says Quack. "It's a great story!" He laughs. "Oh, boy. Those were the days, my friends, those were the...anyways," he continues, sitting down on his side, "It all started a long, long, uh, very very long time ago. And I'll start at the beginning." As he talks, Chirp looks exhausted and slouches, and Peep looks kinda sad. We fade to the sky late in the day. We hear Quack laughing and quacking and pan down to see him in the same position, Beaver Boy still sharpening the "tooth" (there's a small pile of shell dust), and Peep and Chirp lying back-to-back and looking incredibly bored."So then I said," says Quack, "'Go on---you can't fool me! You're talking to a duck!' You're talking to a duck!" he repeats, laughing and slapping his left foot on the ground. "So then I said..." he starts to continue, when we hear Beaver Boy say, "Look everybody," causing Quack to look over. We get another shot of everyone and see that Beaver Boy has molded the shell into a small rectangular shape. "It's done!" he says. He turns his head away, fixing the "tooth" in his mouth, and then turns back around, exclaiming, "Ta-da!" and opening his mouth to show them the new, rather crooked looking "tooth". The birds cheer happily. "Are you ready?" Beaver Boy asks. The birds nod. "Here goes," Beaver Boy says, and runs to the left. The birds and us viewers follow him to a tree (from the tooth marks, it appears to be the one he was gnawing earlier) and as he stops by it, the birds screech to a halt. Rubbing his paws together in preparation, Beaver Boy sets his old tooth and new one to the tree and starts gnawing...and almost immediately the fake tooth comes out. "Oops...wait, I wasn't ready," he says, picking up the fallen "tooth" and readjusting it in his mouth. He starts to gnaw again...and again, the "tooth" almost immediately falls out. "Poor Beaver Boy," says Joan. "His new tooth just wouldn't stay in." Chirp tells the upset Beaver Boy that she guesses it has to be attached to your mouth. Beaver Boy cries a bit. "My grandfather was a beaver," he says, "My mother and father are beavers...being a beaver is all I know how to do!" Chirp hops over to him, saying, "Beaver Boy, I'm telling you...you are still a beaver!" She tilts her head, looking at his gap. Beaver Boy sadly starts to walk off, and Chirp looks saddened, too. "Hey, I know!" says Quack from offscreen. Beaver Boy pauses and he and Chirp look at him. "You can be a fish!" Quack says cheerfully. "Fish don't need teeth!" And he pretends to gargle, swishing, standing on his right foot and shaking his left, and then gurgling and swishing some more. "Right?" he says, nodding. "Quack!" Chirp says, annoyed, as Beaver Boy walks offscreen. "Beaver Boy is still a---" and we hear more gargling from offscreen, and see Quack continue to do his fish impression. "Oh forget it!" a frustrated Chirp says as a creepy chord plays. And she looks annoyed. We fade to the inside of Beaver Boy's dam at night. His parents are sleeping. Beaver Boy comes over and sighs, "Being a beaver was sure fun while it lasted." His dad, who apparently wasn't asleep after all, asks him, "Why son, what's the matter?" Beaver Boy explains that he lost his tooth. His dad examines it and tells him he didn't lose his tooth---he broke it (I should point out his dad actually has a chipped tooth, too) probably while he was chewing a tree. Beaver Boy continues to look sad and says, "Do I have to go live with the fith?" (Yeah, he's lisping a bit). "Live with the fish?" his dad says, confused. "Of course not!" he says, smiling. "You know, son, the very same thing happened to me. I was gnaw-gnaw-gnawing away one night, and snap---my tooth broke off! But, it kept on growing. And pretty soon it was as good as new." At this last part, Beaver Boy smiles. "Really?" he asks. "Af good af new?" "Even better," his dad responds, patting his son's head. Beaver Boy cheers at this, and the two hug. We then fade to the birds at Quack's pond; Peep sitting on the left, Chirp on the right, and Quack floating in the water with his eyes closed and smiling contentedly, as usual. As Beaver Boy comes in from the right (and as he reaches Peep, gets Quack's attention), Joan explains that the next day Beaver Boy rushed to Quack's pond to share the good news. "Haf it grown yet?" he asks Peep. "Father said it will grow right back." He opens his mouth and Peep inspects it. "It looks a tiiiiinny but longer than yesterday," he tells Beaver Boy, who looks pleased to hear this. He bounces around, yelling, "Yaaaaaayyyy!" Then he says to Peep, "Look again. Is it longer now?" "Um....no," Peep tells him. He then shows it to Chirp as Quack yawns sleepily. Chirp shakes her head. Beaver Boy then shows it to Quack, who swims away, looking bored. "In time," Joan is meanwhile saying, "Beaver Boy grew his tooth back. Not fast enough for some." As she says this last part, Beaver Boy hops over to Peep again, who shakes his head. Meanwhile, the bored-looking Quack goes underwater, and Chirp starts to look extremely bored, too. Beaver Boy shows her his tooth again, and she gets up and hops away, still looking bored. "Not fast enough," says Joan. Beaver Boy then shows Peep his tooth again, and we fade to black. While I'm not a huge Beaver Boy fan, I may have been a little too harsh on him. This episode actually did a pretty good job of portraying him sympathetically. Yeah, he had a few annoying moments, mostly at the end, but not as much as other times. And I kind of felt for him here. Between that and the fact that this isn't a two-part episode, it's easily better than "An Inconvienient Tooth". There were a few highlights in the episode. The scene with Beaver Boy and his dad was very touching, and like the one with his mom in "An Inconvinient Tooth", shows that they're really caring parents. It's nice seeing some caring adults on Peep; the fact that they're not even characters the main cast really interacts with works pretty well, in my opinion. Another thing I really liked was how Chirp showed she cared about Beaver Boy, telling him he was still a beaver and trying to help him. Given her impatience and annoyance with Quack, and the fact that Beaver Boy isn't her friend, I could easily see her not liking him and being reluctant to help, but she has a good heart and shows it here. Of course, even she has standards, as she was keen to get away from him in the end (Peep really should have, too). Quack, of course, didn't fail to be hilarious. The best parts were his story about how he got the shell (which I wish we could have heard more of), his claim that he was giving Chirp the accorn as a present, his talking to Joan and the camera at the beginning, and his fish impressions. It's interesting how, despite being the closest to Beaver Boy, he was the least sensitive and helpful in the situation, but at least tried to help in his own way by telling him he could be a fish, even if it didn't work. Speaking of the fish, it was nice seeing them. Fish Jr. is too cute and one of my favorite characters. There's not a ton else to talk about. Quack hurting his foot was kind of scary to watch. He sure suffers a lot of slapstick, particularly in later seasons. Which is kind of funny to see on a kids show like this. I'm just glad it's him and not Peep or Chirp. Anyways, this episode, while obviously not the best, was still a pretty decent one. Is it Peep on a particularly good day? No, but between the fact that it's shorter than "An Inconvinient Tooth", less odd than "Trading Places", and overall better-written than "The Sounds of Silence" makes it a decent, middle-of-the-road episode. Not one I love, but one I like enough. Category:Blog posts